Today we profile Homemade Design, a customer that utilized ViralSweep for their first super-sized giveaway, giving away over $3,000 in furniture.
In this case study, we will compare their sweepstakes marketing results versus their typical results with Adwords PPC marketing.
Homemade Design is America’s leading online interior design firm, having served over 2,000 clients in 2012 with their affordable DIY online interior design packages.
Results
Homemade Design ran their sweepstakes from December 6 – January 10, a total of 35 days. Over that time period, they received 5,235 email entries, 810 opt-ins to receive ‘special offer’ emails, 700 shares on Facebook, 659 new likes on their Facebook page, and 594 tweets about their giveaway.
Jeff Zettel, vice president of sales and marketing at Homemade Design, said this about his first promotion using ViralSweep: “We received much more brand exposure vs. PPC or Facebook advertising. Our first giveaway generated over 5,000 entries and 810 email list signups with just one giveaway alone! Our newest (third) giveaway is already on track to outperform that.”
As of January 16, 2013, Jeff tells us that they have already designed 27 rooms in conjunction with a promotional code that was sent out to subscribers that they received from the giveaway.
Sweepstakes Marketing vs. Adwords PPC
When it comes to spending money on marketing, you need to have predetermined goals that you want to achieve in order to know whether your marketing efforts are successful or just a drop in the bucket.
In Homemade Design’s case, Jeff told us that their objective with PPC is to “reach an underserved and almost hidden market, one that doesn’t want to pay $250 per hour to hire a designer but would value an opportunity to collaborate with a designer for a fixed fee per room.”
Homemade Design is a small company with a small advertising budget that offers very aggressive design fees that are essentially loss leader investments in the lifetime value of a new customer.
In the past, they were investing in excess of $1,000 per month into Adwords. For every $100 spent, they were seeing between 60-70 clicks.
Their PPC ROI wasn’t turning out to be a good short-term investment, and they were constantly looking for new channels to distribute their brand in a way that was measurable and scalable.
When comparing their PPC efforts to their first giveaway using ViralSweep, Jeff tells us, “ViralSweep is a fixed monthly fee that we can budget. We have total control over multiple giveaways and their duration. What I like best is that we can promote several giveaways at one time in unique ways to capture different target audiences that we are trying to reach. For example, we ran a design giveaway targeted at homeowners and an advertising giveaway targeted at residential product and service providers to spread the word about HMDpro, our online directory.”
Using Adwords in combination with giveaways
We asked Jeff if they still use Adwords even though it wasn’t a good short-term investment for them. He told us that using Adwords retargeting is something that has actually been working very well for them.
Retargeting allows them to circulate their ads to reinforce their brand, bringing them hundreds of thousands of impressions for a small cost.
People who are exploring their site but are not yet ready to pull the trigger will see Homemade Design’s ads on other websites because of retargeting, which helps keep them front of mind even when the user doesn’t click.
One thing that Jeff loves about using ViralSweep is that they can now engage users and get them to opt-in for future offers and communications so that when they are finally ready to pull the trigger, Homemade Design will be there.
Feedback
It is our goal at ViralSweep to create the absolute best product for our customers. In order to make that happen, we always request feedback that will help us improve our service.
We asked Jeff if he would recommend ViralSweep to other businesses. He said, “Absolutely. You have a simple product that produces measurable results. It enables businesses to leverage social media to grow a social following and fast. With the free trial there is nothing to lose and lots to be gained.”
Every company has milestones, and ViralSweep is a tool that can be used to help reach those milestones.
When asked how ViralSweep could help Homemade Design reach their next milestone, Jeff replied, ”I would love to be able to have a ViralSweep Facebook app that I can enable my HMDpro partners to add to their page. If I can take our giveaways and have our 100+ designer partners add it to their Facebook pages as an app tab, then we are really beginning to leverage our target audience and add value to our partners in the marketplace.” Luckily for Jeff, we’ll have something in the works very soon.
